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Partial Payment of Purchase Orders

What is the right way to make a partial payment against an invoice with lots of line items? I have a large dollar invoice that the vendor wanted partially prepaid. If I create a check directly against the purchase order (the item has not been received so there is no Item Receipt yet), the check detail shows all of the invoice line items. It would be really arbitrary to just pay off some of those line items and then fudge the numbers to make what is paid add up to the check amount.

If this were a customer payment against our invoice, Quickbooks has a very nice interface to show partial payment. Ideally it would be nice to have a similar interface for partial payment against the PO, without having to struggle with partial allocations to many line items.

What is the most maintainable way to make the partial payment?

Reply to
Will
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What version are you using? In all 10 versions of QB that I have used over a period of at least an equal number of years you do not and cannot make a payment against a PO, you pay a vendor's bill. When paying the bill you can pay any partial amount you wish and it simply reduces the total balance of the bill, it is not applied against specific items.

I have been using Canadian versions since 4.5, "North American" versions prior to that. Maybe your version works differently.

purchase

Reply to
!-!

I'm in the midst of editing/fixing a large purchase order myself.... my company generally doesn't use them. Looking in the helpfile on how to use purchase orders I found what might be the solution you need under "purchase orders ==> paying with order"

Basically, it tells you to create the vendor check to reference a (new) current asset account such as pre-paid inventory.

Then, at the time you recieve the items, you edit the vendor check to point to the specific items received in the purchase order - as opposed to the pre-paid inventory account. The final check will show only the items received against it.

Hope it works. I'm looking to do something similar myself.

Reply to
L

Your back with yet another question. Will wonders never cease.

Reply to
Allan Martin

You can write a vendor a check at any time and post it against "accounts payable". You cannot post it against a purchase order because purchase orders are a non-posting account. However when you do receive the items and the bill, the amount you previously paid will show up in the pay bills area as a credit. Simply apply that credit to the bill, and pay the remaining amount.

Gary

Reply to
Gary E

What threw me off was that when I created the check, the system announces that it finds Open POs for the vendor and gives me the opportunity to select one of these. At that point the PO detail becomes Items detail on the Split area of the check. I wasn't understanding what that meant in accounting terms. It didn't feel correct, and the posts in this thread confirm that.

What I will do instead is to create a Bill against the PO, then make a partial payment of the Bill. Your approach is also interesting, but I guess in a bigger company you would eat up time with several such transactions for one vendor trying to match them against the Bills that you post.

Reply to
Will

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